There are always some good people who try to help out when disaster strikes. In the face of the catastrophes that have turned millions of people into refugees in the past century—wars, famines, civil wars, floods, fires, probably even the odd plague of locusts—such people, and the international aid organizations they work for, have helped ameliorate the situation on the ground, bringing tents, blankets, medicine and food to enable the refugees to survive at a minimal level. But none of this solves the underlying question of what to do with them if they can’t or won’t return to their homelands. Resettlement is expensive and difficult to organize. Generally, few countries are willing to take the refugees, and nobody wants to pick up the tab.
The list of refugee problems over the past century is very long. Before the Second World War, it was Jews from Germany; after the war, “displaced persons” from Eastern Europe, including more Jews, as well as the Palestinians in the Middle East. Then came decolonization and the accompanying wars of independence, creating millions of refugees in Africa and Asia. In the mid 1970s, Communist takeovers in South-East Asia caused the flight of millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians. In the 1980s, Afghanistan became a major source of refugees; later it was Tamils fleeing Sri Lanka and Rohingas fleeing Myanmar. As of 2023, UNHCR had thirty million refugees under its care, less than a third of the estimated total number of refugees worldwide. Few of these refugees were welcome in the First World countries that they aspired to reach: Australia’s pioneering, if inhumane, policy of “turning back the boats” of refugees from Asia found emulators in British and European governments faced with armadas of small, unseaworthy vessels full of refugees from North Africa and Asia trying to cross the Channel and the Mediterranean. Race was a factor, though not the only one, in the cold reaction of the First World to “illegal migrants.” The only refugees of the early twenty-first century to receive a warm welcome were Ukrainians, white, and coded for democracy, leaving after the Russian invasion of 2022.
Good people can help alleviate refugee crises, but they can’t solve them. That can only be done by international diplomacy and a lot of money. Humanitarianism cut little ice here; there has to be some quirk of the geopolitical alignment that gives key players, with deep pockets, an interest in solving the problem. If that is absent, refugee problems can go unsolved for decades.
In the five years after the end of the Second World War, the fledgling United Nations focussed on two big refugee problems. The first was that of a million DPs, displaced by the Second World War from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, unwilling to return home, and held in camps in Germany, Austria and Italy under the care first of UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and then, from 1947, by the IRO (International Refugee Organization). The second was that of about 700,000 Palestinians displaced in the Middle East in connection with the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, and looked after by a United Nations agency created for the purpose in 1949, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees).
The fates of the two groups could scarcely have been more different. The Palestinians were still under UNRWA care more than 70 years later, their numbers (before the Gaza war) grown to six million, with no solution in sight. The DPs, on the other hand, were mainly resettled by 1951, having received free passage to First World countries more or less of their choice (or, for Jewish DPs only, Israel) over the previous four years. Seven decades on, their descendants are fully assimilated citizens of the United States, Australia, Israel, Canada, and various countries of Latin America.
Even before this miraculous solution of the DP problem, the DPs in Europe—former forced laborers in wartime Germany, Soviet soldiers who had fallen prisoner of war to the Germans, and individuals who had voluntarily left the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with the retreating Germans in 1944-5, German Jews and a late-arriving postwar stream of Jews from Poland—had fared singularly well. Most refugees, including the Palestinians, find themselves living in tents in ad hoc camps. The DPs in Germany were housed in permanent weather-proof accommodation (barracks, hospitals, resorts); fed, clothed and provided with medical and child care and schooling; free to work, but not obliged to do so; with a range of ways of passing the time from competitive sports, choral groups and folk weaving to having babies with the support of UNRRA’s mini-welfare state.
For the significant number of non-Jewish East European refugees who had served in military units under German command in the war or otherwise collaborated, access to these benefits (requiring official registration as a “displaced person”) was sometimes initially difficult, since the international organizations’ mandates excluded care and maintenance of wartime collaborators. But as the Cold War took hold, Nazi collaborators came to seem much less of a threat than Communists and Soviet sympathizers, IRO eligibility policy relaxed, and many of the formerly excluded collaborators were able to register as DPs and receive the associated benefits
From 1947, with the advent of IRO in place of UNRRA, those benefits included resettlement. UNRRA, created in 1943 with the Soviet Union as a member, had considered repatriation, not resettlement, to be its mandate. When repatriation proved impossible because of DP resistance, this created a dilemma that was solved only by the withdrawal of financial support from UNRRA’s main funder, the United States. The successor organization, IRO—more firmly under US control, and almost entirely US-funded—came in with an explicit mandate of resettlement. The Soviet Union, which declined to join IRO, fiercely opposed any disposition of its half a million displaced citizens except repatriation, describingtheir resettlement as “theft” by capitalist countries seeking cheap labor, but to no avail. In the context of emerging Cold War, Soviet objections only encouraged the US to push ahead.
By 1951, over a million DPs from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had been resettled, the largest number in the US, followed by Australia. There were some problems about resettling collaborators (specifically those who had fought under German command during the war), but these were overcome by what IRO euphemistically described as “liberalization” of its eligibility criteria. There were also a few problems involving race, once it became clear that not everyone from the Soviet Union could be classified as “European” (white), but these were solved by some fancy legal footwork in the US that established that the (Mongol-origin) Soviet Kalmyks were in effect European because of centuries of intermarriage with Russians and their espousal of democratic values.
The key that unlocked the US Congress’s funds—which paid not only for US resettlement, but the whole program—was a rebranding of DPs from being “victims of war and fascism,” according to UNRRA’s original definition, to victims of communism (which was the DPs’ own preferred identification, lent plausibility by the fact that the homes they had left were now under communist rule). In a context of Cold War ideological competition, the propaganda gains of having a million refugees from communism repudiating “totalitarian tyranny” and choosing to live in the “free world” were immense, and the US made full use of them.
Thus, the postwar DP problem was solved by the Cold War, with the coding of the refugees as European and democratic as a necessary precondition. This conclusion is not much help to anyone wanting a practical guide about to how to solve contemporary refugee crises. But it does help us understand why, in the early twenty-first century, Ukrainian refugees (European, democratic, fleeing the Soviet Union’s successor state, Russia, which, while no longer communist, is still coded tyrannous) have fared so well, and Palestinians (non-Europeans whose enemy, Israel, is coded democratic by its Western supporters) so badly.
Sheila Fitzpatrick is the author of many books, including On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Princeton), The Shortest History of the Soviet Union, and The Russian Revolution. She is professor of history at the Institute of Humanities and Social Science at the Australian Catholic University and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago.